(AP) Module 8: Fools for Gold

Home , John Davis (explorer), Martin Frobisher, Samuel Hearne

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Fools for Gold Module 8 - Akshayuk Pass Expedition

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TO THE NORTH

Ray and the team are well into the Akshayuk Pass now, making their way past towering walls of rock, and over terrain tilled by the great hand of glaciers. Would-be explorers, mining knowledge and experience, a gift rarely afforded to prior generations. A gift we are privileged to acknowledge, bequeathed by the wealth and technology of our day.

Indeed, explorers from an earlier age did not have the advantages afforded by our current technology. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to keep one from getting lost, satel- lite phones to call for help, and airplanes to come to the rescue. Historically those who traveled to the Arctic were gone for years, and lost to communication until they returned. Many never returned.

What drove people to explore the north: to risk their lives and expose themselves to profound privation? The exploration of the Arctic spans almost 450 years, and continues to this day. While early explorers were looking for spices from China, current exploration is focused on precious resources like oil, diamonds and gold. Caught in the mix has been the Inuit people, and the welfare of those who call the Arctic home has often been overlooked in the drive to explore.

GETTING THERE

The principal means of travel for early explorers was by boat; sailing ships to cross the ocean and freigh- ter canoes to travel inland waterways. As time passed, new technologies were adopted that ex- panded both the range and speed of travel. Some of Figure 1: Traditional snowshoe (author: katpatuka, wikimedia commons) these technologies were learned from the local i2P • Akshayuk Pass Education Resource • High School 2 i2P • AP Module 8 • Fools for Gold people, like dog-teams or snowshoes, both of which allow far greater mobility and speed on snow and ice. Others means of transportation were a product of invention, like steam ships, snowmobiles, airplanes, and submarines. As a collective, these modes of transportation have made the Arctic far more accessible, and have had a profound effect on the way of life of the Inuit people.

Table 1: Means of transportation in Arctic Exploration Year Explorer Means of Details Transportation 1576 Martin Frobisher Sailboat First European to explore the Arctic and encounter the Inuit. Mined fool’s gold in Frobisher Bay.

1770 Samuel Hearne Foot Over a period of 18 months Hearne walked from Churchill Manitoba to Bathurst inlet on the Arctic coast a trip of over 3000 kilometers as the crow flies.

1845 Sir John Franklin Steam Ship The Erebus and the Terror, the famous sailing ships taken on the ill-fated Franklin Expedition were each fitted with 20 horsepower steam engines, a first in Arctic exploration.

1845 John Rae Snowshoes Among Arctic explorers Rae was known for his prodi- gious stamina and skill with snowshoes. During one two month period he traveled 1,200 miles on snowshoes.

1871 Charles Francis Hall Iceberg The ill-fated Polaris expedition to the north pole ended when 19 crew members abandoned their ship, which was being crushed by ice, for a nearby iceberg. They lived on the iceberg for 6 months traveling 1500 kilometers before being spotted by a passing ship and rescued.

1903 Roald Amundsen Dog Team Amundsen learned how to run sled dogs during the winters he spent with the Netsilik Inuit during his jour- ney through the Northwest Passage. He later used dog teams to travel to the South Pole.

1926 Umberto Nobile Balloon Nobile was the first person, along with Roald Amund- sen to fly a balloon airship over the North Pole.

1926 Richard Byrd Plane Byrd is considered to be the first person to fly to the North Pole – although this is disputed.

2007 Russian Federation Nuclear In 2007 the Russian Federation planted a flag in the Submarine ocean floor at the North Pole using a nuclear submarine.

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MARTIN FROBISHER

Martin Frobisher left England in his sailboat on June 15th 1576 with the intention of finding the Northwest Passage and delivering all the wealth of the Far East to his King and Country. Some two months later he entered the bay in Baffin Island that now bears his name, and thought he was in a strait that separated Asia from North America. He an- chored off Kodlunarn Island 120 miles into the ‘strait’ and there encountered Baffin Is- land Inuit. Martin Frobisher was the first European to seek out a passage to the Orient through the Arctic, and this was the first documented encounter between the Inuit and foreign explorers.

Although the initial interaction was peaceful, prior Did You Know? to his departure Frobisher abducted an Inuit man, Although the first documented and with some black rock he had collected from encounter between the Inuit and the island returned to England and presented his foreign explorers was the visit of Martin Frobisher, it is known that prizes to the financiers who had funded the trip. the Vikings traveled to the North- The unfortunate Inuit captive soon died, but the ern waters centuries before, and rocks proved a wondrous bounty when an assayer there is some evidence that early Chinese seafarers may also declared that they contained a rich quantity of gold have visited the region. ore. A second voyage was quickly struck, and Fro- bisher returned the following summer with a larger ship and crew to mine more of the precious stone. Tensions arose with the local people, there was a battle with three Inuit being killed and once more Frobisher took some cap- tives, two women and a child, and returned them once more as prizes to England. It was only after Frobisher returned from a third expedition the following summer – with fifteen ships, the single largest Arctic Expedition ever mounted before or after – that it was established that the special rock contained no gold at all. It was fool’ s gold.

THE PASSAGE REALIZED ! ! With Frobisher in financial ruins and the lure of gold gone, once again the focus turned to finding the Northwest Passage. John Davis sailed from England on May 7 1586 on the first of two voyages aimed at discovering the Northwest Passage. On the first trip he had bloody encounters with Inuit in southern Greenland. Like his predecessor Fro- bisher, he also took an Inuk captive and returned with him to England. It was on his i2P • Akshayuk Pass Education Resource • High School 4 i2P • AP Module 8 • Fools for Gold second voyage in 1587 that Davis became the first recorded white man to enter Cum- berland Sound and sail past the present day location of Pangnirtung. Davis recorded

Figure 2: The Northwest Passage. The white signifies areas of year round sea ice (courtesy NASA). seeing many signs of human activity, but no people. William Baffin followed Davis by about thirty years and in his pursuit of the Northwest Passage traveled much of the northern aspect of the great Island that now bears his name, and passed the present day location of Qikiqtarjuaq. Thus by the early 17th cen- tury the waters that border the Akshayuk Pass had been mapped by Europeans.

Over the next three hundred years countless expeditions set Video Link: out to find the Northwest Passage, but without success. Per- The mystery of the haps the most renowned of these voyages was that of Sir John Franklin Expedition. Franklin, who famously vanished and perished with all his men,

Part 1 Part 2 spawning centuries of speculation about what exactly led to the Part 3 Part 4 failure of the expedition. Part 5 Part 6

It was not until 1906 that Roald Amundsen in the sloop Gjoa finally navigated the fabled Northwest Passage. It had taken European explorers 330 years to navigate the Northwest Passage, and when Amundsen finally charted the waters the Oriental Spice trade was a thing of the past.

SEEKING RICHES

There has been continued exploration in the Arctic since Amundsen’s fabled voyage, but this has been less about discovering a route than about discovering mineral resources. i2P • Akshayuk Pass Education Resource • High School 5 i2P • AP Module 8 • Fools for Gold

Any story about the Arctic is not complete without addressing the role that economics has played and continues to play in the fate of the region. It has long been recognized that the vast and remote domain of the Arctic harbours huge riches in natural resources; natural gas, oil, diamonds, wildlife, to name but a few of the economic opportunities of- fered by the land. Although the early European explorers did not seek out the Arctic for its inherent riches, they did seek it out for an economic purpose: to find the Northwest Passage to the Orient and the wealth of the Spice Trade. Current exploration continues to focus on the capacity of the arctic to generate wealth.

Consider the two i2P Akshayuk Pass Expedition youth ambassadors that hail from northern Canada. Thomsen D’Hont is from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, a city established 75 years ago after the discovery of a rich vein of gold in the area. Most of the gold has been extracted but the discovery of diamonds in the region has provided continued prosperity. In the community of Bak- er Lake, just ‘down the road’ from Kathleen Merritt’s hometown of Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, they have recently dis- covered gold, and a mine is soon ready to open there. The prosperity of both territories is firmly tied to their natural resources.

This is not likely to change soon. Consid- er that the two territories that Thomsen and Figure 3: Areas (in green) of presumed Arctic oil and gas reserves that have yet to be exploited. Note that the ocean surrounding the Cumberland Penin- Kathleen come from sula and the Akshayuk Pass (East Canada) is thought to be rich in oil and gas have the following reserves(courtesy United States Federal Government). combined reserves:

• 1,929,000,000 (trillion) barrels of crude oil;

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• 31,400,000,000 (trillion) cubic feet of natural gas.

Given that the total population of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut is 74,000 people, by any measure this is indeed a remarkable amount of energy resources for such a small population.

But history has shown that explorers ‘from away’ will often seek what resources are there to be taken. Whether it is Martin Frobisher seeking gold or spices and taking local people captive, or modern explorers seeking oil and gas, questions of ownership, auton- omy and preservation of the land and culture must be carefully considered.

Profile: Minik Wallace Book: ‘Give Me My Father’s Body’ by Ken Harper Perhaps the most tragic story of Inuit abduction is that of Minik Wallace. Minik was a Greenlandic Inuk who was taken to New York City by the American explorer Robert Peary in 1897 at the age of 10. He was taken with his Father and four other Inuit on Peary’s ship to New York City, with the promise by Peary that he would return them home in a year laden with the riches of Amer- ica. What happened was quite the opposite. Peary forgot about them after handing them over to the American Museum of Natural History where they became a ‘living display’ that visitors to the museum could observe. Lacking natural immunity to common infections, all but Minik soon died and he was left, an orphaned Inuk child from Greenland alone in New York City. The skeletons of those that died, including his father where then put on display in the Mu- seum of Natural History.

Minik spent 12 years in the United States before being repatriated to his home in Greenland at the age of twenty-two. He died in the great Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918 at the Age of 31, on a return visit to New York.

A final suggestion:

Stories of northern exploration are laden with fascinating personalities, remarkable feats of survival, mystery and intrigue, and horrific and tragic death. If you are a fan of adventure, dipping into the extensive literature on Arctic exploration will provide boundless entertainment.

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